U.S. considers river cuts that would strip all water from CAP

Deliveries to the Central Arizona Project that serves Tucson and Phoenix drinking water could be wiped out by one alternative water-saving plan now undergoing federal review, and cut to the bone by another.

Cuts of this nature could occur if either of these plans is adopted by the US. Interior Department and Lake Mead falls to 950 feet, a little less than 100 feet below where its water stands today.

The projections appear in Interior’s just-released Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement on how to bolster the Colorado River’s chronically overused supplies and rebuild its depleted reservoirs over the next three years.

These are among many possible cuts of river water use by farms and cities alike that are now going through federal environmental review. They would be so severe that some officials from both Arizona and California say they hope they’ll never occur.

The cuts are contained in two alternatives for river management that Interior is considering. While one proposal would clearly favor California and the other would favor Arizona in theory, both alternatives contain cuts severe enough to significantly hurt farms and cities in both Arizona and California, the draft environmental report shows.

The cuts would span from 2024 through 2026 but the first year’s cuts would be much lesser in scope. They would be programmed to get steeper as Lake Mead continued falling. The harshest cuts would be imposed if Mead sinks to 950 feet, the level below which Hoover Dam would no longer be able to generate power.

In releasing the draft environmental report Tuesday, Assistant Interior Secretary Tommy Beaudreau said at a news conference at Hoover Dam that he hopes these proposals would serve as “bookends” between which less harsh cutback plans would be placed.

The same day, Beaudreau was quoted by the New York Times as saying in an interview, regarding a possible cut that would slash Arizona and Nevada’s river water supplies, “Those are consequences that we would not allow to happen.”

Beaudreau also was quoted saying he was “pretty comfortable” that allocating cuts evenly among the states would let Interior meet its goals — preventing water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell from falling below critical levels, protecting health and safety, and not exceeding the department’s legal authority.

He also defended the federal government’s willingness to depart from longstanding seniority rules about water rights, arguing that the shocks of climate change couldn’t have been predicted when those rights were agreed to decades ago, the Times article said.

Bart Fisher, a negotiator on river matters for California, said he believes Interior devised these “extreme” proposals to scare the states into compromise.

“I think they recognize that the extremes could drive people into litigation,” said Fisher, president of the Palo Verde Irrigation District, headquartered in Blythe along the river.

‘Would essentially take CAP down to zero’

Under the first of the two alternatives, CAP would lose 741,000 acre-feet if Mead is at 950 feet. That’s close to half of the CAP’s federally authorized supply of about 1.6 million acre-feet.

That cut would come on top of around 720,000 acre-feet of reductions it’s already agreed to take under an approved, 2019 drought contingency plan. The total cut of 1,461 million acre-feet “would essentially take CAP down to zero,” Interior spokesman Tyler Cherry told the Arizona Daily Star.

Under the other alternative, CAP would lose an additional 603,000 acre-feet at 950 feet, on top of what it stands to lose under the earlier agreements, for a total cut of 1.323 million acre-feet.

That would leave the project with less than 300,000 acre-feet of its authorized supply. To put that into perspective, that would be just enough to meet water demands from only its Pima County users, including Tucson, its suburbs and the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui tribes — but the CAP also must serve many other users.

At the same Lake Mead elevation, California’s urban water users would lose 843,000 and 724,000 acre-feet, respectively, under the two federal alternatives.

The proposals are designed under entirely different schemes for determining how much water will be cut from each user’s supplies.

Alternative 1 bases its cuts on what priority each user has for taking water, a formula tied to the age of their water rights. It helps California, whose farmers have some of the oldest water rights in the entire Colorado River Basin, dating back at least a century.

Alternative 2 slices cuts proportionally, with each user taking an equal share. That benefits Arizona because the CAP, in particular, stands at the bottom of the priority list under Alternative 1, with its rights dating back only to when Congress authorized the project in 1968, and because Arizona owns far fewer river water rights than California — 2.8 million acre-feet vs. 4.4 million.

Yet as the cuts are now designed, in some cases California takes greater hits under Alternative 1 than under Alternative 2.

Interior officials have given the public 45 days from Tuesday, April 11, to submit written comments on the draft document. They say they’ll make a decision on an alternative in August.

In the meantime, officials of the seven Colorado River Basin states continue to talk, in hopes of negotiating their own settlement, to avoid both federal involvement and costly litigation that could delay finding a solution for years.

“There’s something to dislike for everybody in these proposals,” said Terry Goddard, the CAP’s board president. “If that’s not a powerful incentive to go back and find our own solution, I don’t know what is.”

Alternative 2, does, however, offer Arizona some "breathing room" because it calls for much smaller cutbacks in CAP deliveries at higher elevations of Lake Mead than does Alternative 1, Goddard said.

For instance, Alternative 1 would require more than 700,000 acre-feet in CAP cutbacks when Mead is at 1,040 to 1,045 feet. That's almost as steep a cutback that would face CAP when Lake Mead fell to 950 feet. But Alternative 2 would require only 261,000 acre-feet in cuts at the same elevation range at Lake Mead, and wouldn't require even 500,000 acre-feet in cutbacks until Mead fell to 1,000 feet in elevation, the Interior draft environmental report shows.

Initial staff review by Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District of the draft environmental report suggests that neither alternative Interior studied is ideal, said the district’s general manager, Adel Hagekhalil.

“Both include significant supply cuts that would hurt Metropolitan and our partners across the basin. There is a better way to manage the river,” Hagekhalil said in a written statement.

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Farm job losses projected

For Arizona farms along the river, the cuts will hit particularly hard economically under Alternative 1, the environmental report shows.

The number of jobs projected to be lost in 2025 and 2026 ranges from 1,060 to 7,078 if Lake Mead stays above 1,075 feet. But if the lake falls to 950 feet, more than 7,000 jobs could be lost and up to 194,000 acres of Arizona farmland could be taken out of production in five counties, including some in Pima and Pinal counties.

Under Alternative 2, up to 196,000 acres of farmland would be fallowed in 2025 and 2026, although only up to 4,400 jobs would be lost.

In California, up to 2,400 farm jobs would be lost and 175,000 acres of farmland would be fallowed under Alternative 1, while up to 2,900 jobs would be lost and up to a 214,000 acres of farmland would be fallowed under Alternative 2.

‘Will have to look at all other supplies’

If CAP were ever “zeroed out,” what impacts would that have on Tucson and other cities that depend on the canal project? And could such a proposal ever come to pass?

If that were to happen during the three years covered by the new study, a shutdown of CAP would have no immediate impact on Tucson supplies because the city government has stored close to six years’ supply underground for use when needed, said Kathy Jacobs, a University of Arizona climate scientist and former Arizona Department of Water Resources official.

If a cut on that scale were to happen for the long term, the impacts to Tucson would be “substantial,” she added, although it’s not exactly clear when such impacts would be felt.

Decisions of that magnitude affecting CAP and other water users would most likely be made when the river basin states adopt new, long-term guidelines for reservoir operations after 2026.

If that happens, “we will have to look at all our supplies,” and treating effluent to drinking quality is one of several options available, said Jacobs, director of UA’s Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions.

Looking more broadly at impacts of CAP cuts statewide, “you can’t just look at the number of acre-feet lost. You also have to understand how that water is currently being used,” said Kathryn Sorensen, a senior research fellow for Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy.

That’s because a substantial amount of CAP water whose rights belong to cities and tribes actually ends up every year on farms — about 450,000 acre-feet in 2022, said Sarah Porter, Kyl Center director. That was nearly half the canal project’s total deliveries that year.

Cities and tribes both send fair amounts of CAP water to farms, where it’s used to irrigate crops in place of nonrenewable groundwater. For doing so, the cities and tribes get “credits” from the state, allowing them to pump groundwater elsewhere without facing stiff restrictions under Arizona’s groundwater law.

“If the impact of shortages is that you are not banking water for the future, that’s different if a city or town is actually delivering Colorado River water by the tap,” Sorensen said.

Porter said she doesn’t think “we’ll have a world in which no water comes through the CAP.” If the river itself lacks water for it, “there’s probably some kind of creative exchange of water that we’re not privy to that could insure some water is running in the CAP.”

From what she’s heard from people who work for the CAP and the Arizona Department of Water Resources, if the $4 billion CAP were to sit idle for a long time, its pumps would ultimately fail — “it would be devastating to the infrastructure.”

“You can’t just turn them off and keep them off and wait a few years,” Porter said.

Feds willing to set aside historic priorities?

Interior’s Beaudreau expressed willingness in the New York Times interview to cut all water users equally, rather than following historic priorities.

California river-use negotiator Fisher said he found the comment disappointing, although he doubts that it’s the official position of the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the river for the Interior Department.

At the same time, “nobody in California has ever said CAP goes to zero. That’s never been the California position with regard to CAP,” Fisher said.

CAP Board President Goddard noted that while at Hoover Dam Tuesday, Beaudreau said he would “pay attention to health and safety” in making a final decision — a point long argued by Arizona officials who say any cuts to CAP must protect public health and safety.

J.B. Hamby, a top Colorado River official in California, said the Times’ reporting’s implications don’t seem consistent with comments that Beaudreau has expressed publicly and in conversation with him.

Melissa Schwartz, an Interior spokeswoman, told the Star, “I was not present for the interview with the Times, but would assume that anything quoted is being done accurately.”

The Times story led with a statement that Interior is proposing “to put aside legal precedent and save what’s left of the river by evenly cutting legal allotments.” But Schwartz noted that the draft environmental report contains no “preferred alternative,” the tactic commonly favored by federal agencies when they recommend a particular course of action.

“While I can’t comment on what may or may not have transpired in the interview between the Times reporter and the deputy secretary, my interpretation is that Interior and Reclamation remain committed to fostering successful voluntary agreements between basin states,” said Hamby, who chairs the Colorado River Board of California and is a Colorado River commissioner for the state.

“The general direction of the Lower Basin states (California, Arizona and Nevada) is not to pick one alternative or another, or default to Interior to have to pick one for us, but instead to develop a true seven-state consensus that would be more of our own alternative 3 than an alternative 1 or 2,” Hamby said.